


Home on the Range

by Nell65



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 17:06:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17964593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nell65/pseuds/Nell65
Summary: Sometimes you chose one thing for the best of reasons, and then you force a second chance to get it right.Best to assume this is antibellarke and anti-Clarke and read at your own risk if any negativity at all toward either might upset you.





	Home on the Range

**Author's Note:**

> **Prairie Dawn**  
>  Willa Cather, 1873 - 1947
> 
> _A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;_  
>  _A pungent odor from the dusty sage;_  
>  _A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;_  
>  _A breaking of the distant table-lands_  
>  _Through purple mists ascending, and the flare_  
>  _Of water ditches silver in the light;_  
>  _A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;_  
>  _A sudden sickness for the hills of home._

After driving through kilometer after uninterrupted kilometer of rolling grasslands, broken only by the tiny white dots of distant sheep and the rare turnoff marking an isolated farm station, Bellamy finally spied the sign he'd been seeking. Standing off to the left and mounted on a post listing bravely into a patch of overgrown brush was a large square of pale grey boards painted with the dark shadow of an open hand, a barbed spiral burrowing endlessly inward on the outstretched palm.

The harsh light of the twin suns had already burned the rich blue-black paint of the Azgeda sigil to little more than a ghostly imprint.

Bellamy firmly dismissed any morbid thoughts about whatever else of their lost homeworld that the suns might have burned away.

The hand just needed fresh paint, that’s all. And furthermore, the turnoff marked by the signpost was more or less exactly where John had said it would be, some thirty klicks off the paved highway that linked the rural zones of the outer province to the district municipality. Bellamy had plenty to be pleased about all things considered.

Which hadn’t stopped his vision from going a tiny bit blurry the moment he caught sight of that familiar handprint. Or his heart from pumping just that little bit harder. Or his blood from thrumming in his ears. He'd even had to swallow hard to get a little moisture back into his very dry throat.

He blinked the haze away, shaking out the humming at the same time. Pre-combat jitters. He hadn’t felt them in some time, but it wasn’t a sensation you forgot.

His second-hand cheaply built truck elected that moment to make another one of its distressing whining and clunking sounds, followed by a loud unhappy backfire.

Raven had been really dismissive of those backfires.

“Only primitive engines do this shit,” she’d said with a sneer. “Ethanol. Good god.”

“Well, primitive is all I could buy,” he’d reminded her. It taken every spare coin he had as it was. “Can you get it running or not?”

Raven had managed, and he’d made it this far. Out to the very edge of the human settlements on this world.

He reached out and stroked the stained dash.

“Come on, baby,” he crooned. Mimicking Raven talking to the Ring, all those years ago. “You can do this. Only a little bit further to go.”

The rattletrap piece of plastic junk masquerading as a functional vehicle decided to accept his praise offering. The engine coughed once more, and resumed its customary chug-chug-chugging. He reduced his speed anyway, gears clanking, telling himself that it was only sensible, now that his destination was near.

The narrow unpaved two-track by the weathered sign disappeared quickly, dipping into a slight vale filled with a surprisingly dense thicket of native scrub.

Bellamy carefully navigated into the rutted path, and proceeded very cautiously lest he break an axel or lose a wheel. He assured himself his stomach was lurching only because of the potholes and washouts and stones. It had nothing to do with his nerves.

The narrow drive led him into an overgrown grove of young native trees, saplings maybe twenty years old now. He wondered idly who'd planted them and why, just a few years before their ship had arrived. Thick and dense, their strange feathery blue fronds rustled and whistled in the late day breeze. He couldn’t see much to either side and very little ahead.

Then he drove out of the windbreak and into the golden pink of the prairies beyond.

His heart started thumping a lot harder.

Echo’s stock operation looked almost exactly how he’d pictured it would. Like all the human homesteads showcased in the news vids in the distant capitol city. Or the farms in the old Earth movies on the Ark from his childhood, or the now ancient history texts he’d gobbled up as a teen, a long time ago and far, far away.

Straight ahead of him a little house hunkered down from the prairie winds, pressed into the lea of a small rise and surrounded by more softly rolling pastures dotted with the now much larger looking familiar grey-white sheep and a few splotchy brown and white horses.

A low porch wrapped the house on the two open sides, giving it a more generous air than it otherwise would have had. The extra deep space also provided more roofing to hold the solar array. A bench swing swayed under the eaves, and round pots spilling more of the colorful feathery native plantings softened the harsh edges of the awkward lemon yellow of the adobe-like cement that was the primary construction material in these parts.

A larger adobe barn sat off to the side, with big sliding doors wide and tall enough for farming equipment to clear the entry.

Fences and corrals, water troughs, even a wind-powered turbine pulling water up from the ground to feed into what looked like an irrigation system for a very lush garden completed the comfortable looking homestead.

Except, like the trees along the drive, or his stupid truck, everything was _a little bit_ wrong.

It was almost eerie. Like so much else on this strange planet.

The corners weren’t quite square. The pitches of the roofs were oddly irregular. The window glass was iridescent on the exterior, to fight the glare from the suns. Made everything constructed by human hands seem faintly _melted_ to Bellamy’s senses.

The outside light, always, was doubled. If he ever forgot his eye protectors, the overlapping shadows left him constantly fighting the vague feeling that he was just about to have a creeping migraine.

Even after all these years dirt-side.

He pulled his piece-of-crap truck in next to a much nicer looking vehicle in a parking area marked out by jagged green rocks half buried in the mauve-colored dirt, and cut the engine. His truck coughed and shook itself quiet.

As though they had been watching for this, a pair of rangy dogs Bellamy hadn’t yet noticed shot out from the shade of the porch. They raced towards him barking furiously the moment he placed his foot onto the rough gravel of the parking area.

Bellamy promptly drew his foot back into his truck.

The dogs didn’t look particularly big, and he was pretty sure he could have counted their ribs if he’d really had a mind too. He might even have been able to kick them aside.

But their big mouths, wide and yammering, full of sharp looking yellowed teeth, convinced him to stay where he was, and hope their mistress would hear the commotion and come out to investigate.

She had.

The screen door to the house creaked open, banging shut behind her as she stepped through. A slim upright figure he would have recognized at any distance. No matter how far. No matter how much time had elapsed since the day she’d climbed into a truck not all that different than the one he was in now, and driven away from him.

The day he’d begun to suspect that he might have just made the most personally shattering error of all in an unimaginably and unnaturally long life filled with errors, petty to grand.

Errors in judgment. Errors in action. Errors in understanding. But most of those were errors he allowed himself in hindsight, errors made from the best of intentions, or righteous fury, or some combination of the two. Errors committed while under stress, with no time to think, or plan, or consider.

But the choice of Clarke over Echo had been so much more insidious. It had been slow, and considered, and thoughtful, and wrenching.

He’d come to understand that he couldn’t live his life with Echo while yearning for what might have been with Clarke. So he’d decided that the woman he’d first given his heart to had the most righteous, deepest claim on it.

In one of the more gutting conversations of his life, he’d told Echo he wasn’t choosing her after all.

That he had to do right by his first love, his first loyalties. For himself. For Clarke. For Madi. For their people, as they made their way in this new world among still more strangers who didn’t know them, or like them, or trust them.

He and Clarke were the partnership, the team, the co-leaders, who could see them through. And they needed to be together in all ways. United. Heart and mind, body and soul.

Echo, her brown eyes glassy with tears she wouldn't shed and her chin high in the air, had nodded once. And left him. Her refracted pain had hurt like hell, but he’d still been so sure he’d made the right call, for all of them. That in time she’d also be better off freed from a man who loved her, but had love in his heart for another.

Until she’d climbed into that damned truck with Murphy and Emori and Jordan, and drove away from him for good.

That’s when the first warning that he might have made the wrong choice rippled across his heart. Because he’d wanted to break away from the waving crowd on the steps of the Earther Government House and race after the truck, yelling for them to stop. That this was wrong. A mistake. That they couldn’t leave him there in the capitol, all alone. Without his family. That Echo couldn’t just step outside and leave him.

He’d ruthlessly pushed the wayward feeling down, and turned to Clarke with a smile and a tender kiss.

It was his first lie.

Echo stepped off the porch and out into the suns’ light. Her long dark hair was loose and blowing in the breeze, her eyes hidden behind protectors. She cradled an open shotgun in her arms.

Bellamy raked his eyes over her, hungrily tracing the shape of her jaw, the firm set of her lush mouth, and the visible muscles in her bare arms as she held the weapon close against her leather vest. The shotgun not yet a threat, but he knew just how quickly she could drill him between the eyes with it. If she felt a need or a desire to, if he presented as a threat to her and hers.

She uttered a quick guttural command, Azgedan from the sound of it, though he didn’t catch the word. Her dogs immediately ran to her side, circling around her legs to keep a wary eye on him, the stranger and the threat. They finally settled down at her feet with a sharp hand gesture from her as she came to a halt, about half way between him and the house.

Bellamy noted the dogs’ assess didn’t even touch the ground. They were ready to leap for him the moment she gave them their release.

He was glad she had them, even if they were presently longing for a chance to rip at his legs.

This time he stepped all the way out of the truck, his hands open and wide at his sides. He left his hat on the dash, and he’d already stripped off his protective eyewear, migraine be damned, wanting her to be sure to recognize him.

“Hey,” he called out, pitching his voice to carry. Gentle and calm. “I heard from Raven you might be looking for a hired man.”

Her set mouth fell open in surprise and her tone was utterly gob-smacked. “Bellamy?”

Her hands on her weapon didn’t shift at all.

He nodded and smiled in a way he hoped was warm and positive, and not hungry and desperate. “In the flesh.”

“What are you doing here?” She continued to sound as though she refused believe her own eyes.

“Looking for work.”

“All the way out here?”

“Is this where you are?” He hoped this line came out winningly as it had sounded in his head.

Judging from her tight-lipped frown, maybe not.

She was looking at him as if he were the one who’d lost his mind.

“Yes,” she answered slowly, in the standard careful cadence of a person not sure if they were talking to a drunk or a fool, “This is where I am.”

He was full on grinning now despite her glower. He couldn’t have stopped even had he wanted to. He was so damn happy to see her. He might even have been blinking back a tiny bit of wetness in his eyes. Relief. Joy. Exhaustion. He reminded himself that dropping to his knees and attempting to bury his face in her belly would probably get him shot, or his throat torn out by her dogs. Though at the moment those both seemed like better deaths than many he might have had along the way.

He coughed away his scattered thoughts. “Then here is good.”

Her expression was shifting again as well, but not into a smile. Into something between skepticism and anger. “What the hell, Bellamy! Where’s Clarke? What about your job on the council?”

He shook his head again, trying to get refocused. “Clarke is in the capitol, I assume. And I got fired from that job a while back.”

He’d been fired from a lot more than that job before he was done, but he didn’t need to lay all that out at once.

“For what?” she gasped, indignation mixing in with doubt pouring off her.

He struggled, and failed, not to feel a spark of pleasure at her dismay. Salve to pride he’d thought he’d completely ground away. “I didn’t bring any added value to the table, I was told. I had become… superfluous.”

Nearly two years later, confronted by Echo’s shock, he owned that this dismissal still stung. Even if he had helped to orchestrate the events that had led up to it. Some part of him had clung to the faith, right up to that moment, that Clarke had loved him too much, valued his counsel too much, to do that to him.

He’d been wrong.

Echo looked baffled, then outraged, then suspicious, then thoughtful, all in the space of a heartbeat.

Finally she said, “You might as well come sit. Tell me what you’re really doing out here.”

Bellamy followed her up onto the porch, reminding himself that he’d earned her skepticism. That he was prepared for it. He was the one who’d sent her away. To have tracked her down now must seem to her nothing short of madness.

When she gestured with her chin he took a seat on the swing, the only furniture there was.

She disappeared into the house, leaving the dogs outside.

They lay down by the screen door, watching him with narrowed eyes and hackles raised. Bellamy took this as a sign of their mistress’s continuing unease.

Echo reappeared quickly enough, though. She’d set her eyeshades and her gun aside, though he was sure she still had weapons he couldn’t see, and instead held tall, insulated cups.

“Here,” she extended one toward him as she took the seat next to him, “the drive out here is dusty. Except,” she offered him a quick twisted smile that didn’t reach her eyes, “when it’s muddy.”

Bellamy thumbed the lid open and sniffed tentatively. She’d offered him water. He took a careful sip, well used to the sour taste of this world, and then looked at Echo in astonishment. “This is good. Really good. It tastes of home.”

He’d only lived on Earth a few months, in the end. But those few months had been all he needed to know that the water on his home planet was bred into his very cells. Nothing from anywhere else would ever taste as good. Be as refreshing and as sweet to the tongue, as soothing to his throat, as reviving to his spirits.

“Emori helped me find the right chemical mix for the filters. It’s not exactly like home. But it’s closer. John and Jordan are still trying to figure out how to market it without being insulting.” Echo raised her cup in a toast to the missing men, then sank back into the swing and started it gently rocking with a practiced shove of her booted heel, braced in the floor pavers of the porch. “It’s best cold like this, but even standing temps it’s not too bad. My stock like it, too.” She waved her cup out at her sheep.

Bellamy nodded. “Your flock looks good.”

He looked more closely at some of the nearby animals and saw that this wasn’t merely a commonplace compliment – said anytime someone’s flocks weren’t actively coughing up blood or had their eyes covered in insects. Her animals did look good. Clear eyes, thick pelts, healthy looking feet, and wondered if it was something to do with her better water. Same with her lush garden. “Really good,” he followed up, with much more enthusiasm.

Echo laughed with gentle mockery. It made his heart tight, swelling full with old memories of better times.

“What do you know of sheep?” she asked him.

“I’ve been knocking around the outer provinces for a while. Worked my way around. Picked up a fair number of useful skills.” He let earned pride fill his tone. “I’m not looking for charity here. I’m an experienced ranch hand, now. Promise.”

He met her glance head on, and this time he read only open curiosity her face, her eyes raking his worn clothes, brown and blue, no guard black on him now. She examined his calloused hands, his heavy work boots, and then his face again. He knew from the cracked mirror above the sink in the hostel he’d stayed in the night before that she’d see the grey in his temples and his beard, the sun creases by his eyes, and the skin darkened and freckled from long months of work outside. He wondered if she could see how thin he’d gotten, under his clothes. The hard work of ranching burning away the comfortable bulk he’d picked up in years of city living.

She let her gaze drift back to her flock, and finally out over the land.

He knew she was evaluating all she’d observed, and that he needed to let her finish this process without interruption.

Together they sat and rocked, sipping their water and watching the sheep. Echo’s flocks were scattered in the fenced fields near the house and barn. Empty scrub filled in the middle distance, and mountains with high snowcaps lay distant against the far horizon.

It was very soothing. To sit, and rock and watch the land, peering out at puffy clouds drifting along the horizon from deep inside the cool green shadows of the porch, shielded from the glare of the suns. To breathe in the rich odors of a working ranch. To listen to the wind rustling in the praire grasses, and the distant clacking chatter of the native avians and the chitter of the insects. It gradually dawned on him that he was tired. Bone deep. All the nervous energy that had fueled him until he arrived here at last was draining away, leaving him empty and worn. And he knew for certain now that he’d truly like to stay here a while. Until he was rested and well. For the rest of his life, if the woman at his side would let him.

He snuck quick glances at her profile, and found her little changed despite the near decade since he’d seen her last. There were a few more lines around her eyes, maybe, from squinting against the glare. The grooves around the corners of her mouth a little deeper, from time and harsh living out here, all alone.

Her hair was still long and dark, though, and he guessed that she must be careful to wear a scarf over it when she worked her stock. The suns had burned deep orange streaks even into Octavia’s hair, at least until she’d learned to cover it.

The desire to reach out and run his fingertip across the silky ends, a freedom he’d had once upon a time, before he’d tossed it away, swept through him. He pushed it down. He was very far from regaining that privilege. If he ever did.

Echo asked him no more questions.

She just sat, and rocked.

After a time, he felt the quality of her silence change from contemplation to interest and he knew it was time to begin.

“I am really looking for a job. Seeing as how I need one. And a place to stay. I’m happy to work for nothing more than room and board.”

Echo turned to look at him again. “Why my station?”

“I knew you were alone out here. I also know these stock operations do better the more hands you have.”

She raised one damning eyebrow. “You knew I was alone?”

Bellamy felt his cheeks heat as he confessed, “I’ve always asked Raven and Emori how you were doing. Asked John to keep tabs on you.”

She huffed gently. “Some friends they are.”

“Family,” he corrected softly. “And they always knew how much I wanted to know how you were.”

“They knew you wouldn’t let up if they didn’t answer.” Her tone was quite dry.

Bellamy shrugged lightly. “That, too.”

“So you knew about Sergei.”

“Yes. I was happy you’d found someone. And sorry to hear he’d left.”

At the time he’d told himself, told Raven and Emori and Jordan, that he was sorry.

He hadn’t tried to tell Octavia that. They didn’t tell each other everything, not by a long shot, he and his sister, but they didn’t bother to lie to each other either.

Six months later, when his own life finally completed its slow motion immolation, he’d been fiercely glad that Echo had resumed an un-partnered life. Glad that maybe he might have a chance to reverse the error he he’d barely known he was making when he did it, but had so much cause to regret ever since.

“I told him to go.”

“Even so.”

Bellamy sternly ordered his heart to stay right in his chest where it belonged. Didn’t matter at all how that relationship had ended. None of his business.

At least not right now.

“Now you’re alone all the way out here, trying to run a two person operation all by yourself,” he said.

“I’m not alone. I have the dogs.” She nodded to the two animals lying watchfully at her feet. ‘Sleeping’ with one wary eye on him. She glanced at the sheep and horses in the paddocks. “And my stock.”

“A place like this has plenty of work. More work than one person can really handle. That grove of feather trees on the way in is years overdue for thinning for a start. Let me stay on to do that for you at least.”

Echo scowled at him. “Why you, though?”

“Why not me? It’s not like you’ve advertised for any other help.”

He’d told himself for months on end that there was no possible way she was waiting on him. He’d hoped that she was anyway. Even if she hadn’t suspected it yet, herself.

“Because I don’t trust you.”

“What?” It was his turn to be shocked by her bluntness, even though he knew he’d earned it. “Since when don’t you trust me?”

“You know what I mean.” Echo shot him an annoyed side-eye. “I trust you are an honorable man, Bellamy Blake. You won’t stab me in the dark, you won’t cheat me, you will always do your best to save everyone you can save today, and you always avoid warfare if you can, but fight well when you must.”

Bellamy immediately felt more hopeful.

Then Echo pinned him to his seat with her large brown eyes. “But there’s been no war for me in a long time. So that’s not a pressingly important skill on a ranch.”

Bellamy could only feel chagrin.

“It’s not about your honor, though.” Echo continued, “It’s about your heart. You can’t spend your life with your heart in two pieces, one with her and one with me. I won’t bear the tension of waiting for you to leave me again.”

He dropped his eyes, not wanting her to see just how guilty this twist made him feel.

“I’ve found my own peace out here,” she continued. “I treasure that more than anything I’ve ever had, and I don't trust you not to steal that away from me.”

And this cut was even deeper.

He looked her straight in the eye. “My heart is whole, now, Echo. And all of it is here with me.”

Up went that elegant eyebrow again, quirked in deep skepticism.

Bellamy tried to explain. “Clarke likes power. When I had power, she liked me. Once she finished taking all I had into her own hands, I was reduced to little but her loyal aide. That’s when her attention began to wander. It’s hard to leave your heart in the keeping of someone who doesn’t even see you.”

Bellamy held her questioning gaze, keeping his own open and calm. Maybe someday he’d be able to share with her how stupid he’d felt when he it was finally clear to him what a terrible mistake he’d made.

He’d stayed behind with Clarke because he’d thought they could be a true partners to each other, just as they had been when they were so young, when they’d first fallen to earth. Because he’d believed that their love would see them through. That they would finally be able to establish the deep relationship they’d both sworn that they’d longed for. United at last, a bonded pair forever and ever.

That he would provide the yin to her yang. That he could be the steady hand on her impulsive brilliance and together they could stay true to Monty’s last plea and guide their people, guide humanity itself to peace and prosperity. Do it better.

He’d been seduced by his own hubris. Clarke had never seen him playing that role in her life.

It’s not like he hadn’t had some misgivings. Memories of chains on his wrists and guns in his face. The sharp sting of her hand on his cheek. Or had some cautionary warnings.

Charmaine Diyoza of all people had taken him aside to ask him if he’d known exactly who he was crawling into bed with.

“Trust me,” she’d said, a desert of salt in eyes too old and dry to cry as she nursed her infant daughter. “Choosing the wrong romantic partner for strategic reasons is a mistake you can’t easily walk back.”

Octavia told him flat out that he was an idiot, but in those days he hadn't yet learned to listen to his sister.

Raven said she understood but she thought it wasn’t going to go down the way he hoped, and she was washing her hands of the whole thing. Emori quoted the final line of some parable at him. “You can’t build a strong future on the rubble of someone else’s broken heart.”

John had punched him in the face. Throwing his whole body weight behind the left hook just like Bellamy had been trying to teach him to do for years. Dropped him straight to the ground, folded him up like some cartoon character. Damn near broke his jaw, too.

“That doesn’t mean Clarke would just let you go,” Echo said now. “Especially not back to me.”

“She demoted me, kicked me off the council, moved me out of her rooms, and finally out of her house.”

“What? You’re joking.”

“No. I’m not. Sent me out on a diplomatic press the flesh thing to the folk across The Lake, accompanying her mom and Indra and some planetary dignitaries. I came back to find the door barred and the guard handed me a slip of paper with my new address. Down in the working quarter.”

Only an Arker could truly understand what Clarke had done. What it meant to throw a son of factory out of the inner ring of the capitol to which he’d risen and back into a one-room studio in the distant working quarter, in amongst all the factory hands who built the crappy cars and trucks and cheap plastic fittings for the ugly cement housing that dotted the human occupied portions of the planet.

With a handwritten note: _Thought you’d be more comfortable here. C._

Spitting in his face would have been more loving.

“That’s abrupt,” was all Echo said.

“She has someone new.” It wasn’t even her first someone new, but that hardly mattered to Echo.

“Who?”

“Someone from here.”

“Someone important?”

“Someone with power, anyway.”

Echo snorted.

Then she looked at him, her face creased in concern. “Is Clarke going to show up at my door and collect you again, once she’s over her current affair?”

“She doesn’t suffer fools. I was very foolish.”

Echo shook her head sharply. “You aren’t a fool Bellamy.”

“I let you slip away. So yes. I am.” He meant every word of this, but he kept his voice light. He knew drama at this point would only make Echo laugh, and doubt him entirely.

“Flattering. But untrue. You had good reasons to make a go of it with Clarke. I understood and accepted them, which is why I travelled so far away. All the way to here. As far away as I could go. So I would never be an issue for you, or for her, or for our people. It was the best thing I could do for everyone.”

“Maybe,” he temporized. “They seemed like good reasons in the moment, anyway.”

“You’re sure this isn’t some ruse? She’s not just giving you rope to run, then going to choke you with it, hauling you back in?”

“I waited and worked odd jobs in the capitol for months. She could have brought me back in whenever she liked. Apparently she never cared to do it."

“Not if you looked sad and pathetic.” Echo was back to being acidic and waspish.

Bellamy chuckled at the sound. He’d missed that for so long.

“Oh, I didn’t look pathetic or sad at all,” he assured her.

He’d actually allowed himself to play, for the first time in a very long time. No rules. No rules at all. The grin he shot Echo was large, and real. He’d had a heck of a time for six months or so, until the money ran out.

She looked doubtfully at him, unsure of quite how to decode his look. “After that was when you jobbed around the outer provinces?” she asked.

“Yes. Give me some credit.” For both putting more time and distance between himself and Clarke, and for taking the time to make sure that when he presented himself to Echo, he would be useful rather than a burden. He’d started out on Octavia’s horse spread just outside the capitol, and worked his way on from there.

Echo scowled. “I don’t want to wake up to goons killing my dogs, arresting me for treason, and hauling you out of here in chains.”

“Clarke wouldn’t do that!” Bellamy was both appalled, and yet ruefully aware that from Echo’s point of view this was not entirely impossible to imagine Clarke doing.

“Nia did things like that, and Clarke has more than a touch of the Queen of Azgeda in her now. Slap a skull on her head and a fur on her neck, and she’s almost all the way there.”

Bellamy twisted his lips at this image, unwilling to agree aloud that it worked too well. “I can’t promise. But I think my exit was clean.”

He remembered his cramped little room in the working district. His last demotion back to guard captain, assigned to the most distant City Watch gate. Until he’d shown up hung over one too many times and was righteously sacked. “I truly think she has washed her hands of me.”

Echo grimaced thoughtfully, then lifted her shoulder to shrug. “I can hardly send you away, this close to dark, after you’ve come so far. Supper will be ready in an hour or so. Then I’ll show you around as I do the evening chores. You can sleep in the barn. There’s a room there.”

“The barn?”

“It’s a small house Bellamy. Trust takes time. There’s a cot in the barn. In the house you get the floor.”

“The barn it is. And I’ll start on the feather tree grove tomorrow.”

Echo eyed him narrowly, then bobbed her chin once, accepting his offer. Then she stood up and headed for the screened door. With her hand on the latch, she turned and looked back. “Bellamy?”

“Yes?”

“You look well. And,” she paused, and then for the first time since he arrived, she smiled at him, all the way to her glowing eyes. “It is good to see you.”

Then she vanished indoors.

Bellamy leaned back into the swing, sipped at his water, and rocked.

The campaign to regain Echo’s faith in him was definitely going to take at lot longer than his fondest hopes, he realized. On the other hand, he’d survived this first skirmish. And he’d made it well inside the metaphorical gates. He was also pretty certain that in her smile he’d seen enough to give him confidence in better days to come. Soon as he had a chance, the first thing he was going to look for in the barn was a can of blue black paint.

**Author's Note:**

> This is un-beta'd. Blame no one but me for what you've read here.


End file.
